How To Capture And Edit Screenshots In GIMP For Your E-Book

Reading time: Approximately 7 minutes

Capturing screenshots is a common part of any E-Book, especially for technical based subjects like mine.

I’ve recently been playing around with the GIMP image editor and have found that while it’s not quite as user friendly and feature rich as it’s paid brother Adobe Photoshop, it’s more than enough for basic image editing.

Today I’m going to show you how to edit and tidy up screenshots you might like to paste into your E-Book or blog.

Capture The Image

More often than not, the image you’re after is on a website, or screen of a program.

Personally I have twin monitors so it becomes a chore just capturing the entire output of both images and having to trim it down.

Try this next trick next time you want to capture the output of just one window in Windows. It works for all version of Windows as far as I know. I’m not sure what the Linux/Mac equivalent is, maybe someone can advise in the comments below?

Normally to capture screen output to the clipboard, you just press the “Print Screen” button, often abbreviated to “PrtScn” on the top right of your keyboard.

To capture just the screen output of one window, try holding ALT while you have the desired window in focus and press print screen.

Capturing Screenshots Of One Window

Using GIMP

Open your GIMP image editor, and click on File->New.

Create an image of the same resolution as your desktop (mine is 1280 width by 1024 height per maximized screen – yours could be different), or roughly bigger than you’ll require to paste the image in.

Pasting Your Screenshots In GIMP

Selecting Your Desired Screenshot Image

As you’ve probably already noticed, I’m cutting out the status update image from twitter from one of my tweets.

This could easily be used in an E-Book to highlight something someone has said, or on a blog post (as I’m using it for today!).

To do this, I selected the selection tool from the Toolbox which is the very first one on the top left.

Drag this across your desired image as shown:

Using The Selection Tool In GIMP

Cropping Your Screenshot

The easiest way I’ve found to reduce the image’s size is to select your desired part of the image, and crop the image to the selection.

Cropping basically means removing everything that isn’t selected, and reducing the dimensions of the image to fit.

To crop to your selection we made in the previous step click Image->Crop to Selection.

Cropping In GIMP

Removing Smaller Portions

As I’m cropping the image up, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got. However I do notice that there is time sensitive information in the image that probably won’t make sense when I use it as the header image of my blog post.

Twitter automatically puts in a time stamp of when the tweet was made. When I captured the image, it was only 6 minutes ago. Let’s get rid of it.

Using the selection tool again, select just the timestamp. If it makes it easier to line up, it doesn’t matter if you go out of the boundaries of the image as I have.

Removing A Smaller Selection

Press the delete key to delete the contents of your selection.

Moving Parts Of The Image Around

Ahh, much better, but I still don’t like the fact there is a massive gap. Rather than make this a layer and move it about the image that way, I’m going to cheat by just copying and pasting. Let’s not make this tutorial too complex.

Next, still using the selection tool, I select the bottom part of the image I want to move up.

Moving A Selection

To cut that part of the image, goto Edit->Cut, or press CTRL+X on your keyboard. To paste it again, goto Edit->Paste, or press CTRL+V on your keyboard.

Once you’ve pasted the selection again, you can use your keyboard arrows, or mouse to drag the selection around to the desired position.

Conclusion

The Final Edited Screenshot

There we have it! The final image.

So to summarize what we did:

• Captured the output of just one window.
• Created a new image in GIMP, and pasted our full screenshot it in.
• Selected just the parts we wanted using the selection tool, and cropped it to size.
• Removed time sensitive information that wouldn’t make sense in the final context.
• And finally, moved part of the image up so that there wasn’t a big gap.

You can also do a final crop again just to tidy up the image, or touch up the image using any number of tools, including adding some extra text, or a red arrow, or a circle to draw attention.

Once you’re happy, just click File->Save and save in your desired format (I like .png for E-Books because of the small file size and good quality).

I hope this tutorial has been educational!

I know some people find editing images can be pretty scary, but once you get the hang of doing basic things, you’ll be able to master this tool, just like any number of tools before it.

As always, any questions just shoot me a comment below.